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New UMBC - Northrop Grumman partnership aims to take cybersecurity to a new level.

Military commanders often talk about the need for “situational awareness” — they want to see and track the potential threats facing them, whether they come from planes, ships, troop movements or any other source.

In a traditional conflict, that awareness might come from a giant digital map hanging in a darkened command center. But as the country faces a growing range of threats to the computers and networks that make these maps and other vital technologies possible, it becomes difficult to imagine what a picture to track them would even look like.

“Cyberspace is a domain that was entirely created by humans,” says Chris Valentino ’02, MS ’05, information systems. “There’s no good way to visualize it and to see where the threats are.”

Not yet, anyway. A new partnership between UMBC and the Northrop Grumman Corporation is designed to accelerate the development of this and other types of technology that will help protect the country from these growing cyber threats.

“We want to open the aperture to new technologies and ideas,” explains Valentino, a director of cybersecurity at Northrop Grumman. “We want this partnership to help companies find out-of-the-box solutions that will make our nation more secure.”

UMBC will administer a new NASA research center focused on studying space weather and the impact it can have on human activities.

The Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute (GPHI), operating under a 5-year, $10 million cooperative agreement, will provide support and resources for university researchers to collaborate with scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as they refine efforts to predict the solar activity that ejects charged particles into space. The “weather” created by these events interferes with power grids, telecommunication systems and other activities on Earth, while also threatening spacecraft and creating risks for space travel.

“This agreement offers a great opportunity to continue research that is deepening our understanding of solar and magnetospheric physics,” said Jan Merka, director of the new center. “The main goal is to more reliably predict space weather so we can avoid the impacts on space and Earth activities caused by extreme solar and magnetospheric events.

UMBC has a long history of working closely with scientists at NASA and the Goddard Space Flight Center. In addition to GPHI, UMBC administers the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), which focuses on geosciences and is now in its sixteenth year. The university is also a partner in the Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology (CRESST), which focuses on astrophysics.

Understanding how HIV reproduces is one of the keys to combating AIDS. Michael Summers, an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his colleagues have developed a new technique that will allow scientists to better understand an important early step in the HIV reproduction cycle - a development that could eventually lead to new treatments for AIDS.

"The HIV virus is one of the simplest things in nature that can reproduce," says Summers. "The virus' genetic material, RNA, must be packaged into newly formed viruses in order for those viruses to be infectious and reproduce." Summers and his colleagues have now figured out what a key part of the HIV RNA looks like, and how the RNA "changes its shape" in order to promote reproduction.

Until now, scientists have not had good tools for studying the HIV RNA. Some laboratories, including Dr. Summers' lab, previously focused on tiny pieces of the HIV RNA that, by themselves, don't explain how the RNA works. Larger portions of the HIV RNA have also been studied, but the methods used provided incomplete pictures and led to controversial and often incompatible conclusions among different research teams.

The Summers lab has developed a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique for studying the entire region of the HIV RNA that is responsible for incorporating it into new viruses. "It's like performing MRI, except we take pictures of the RNA molecules instead of large objects like the human body," says Summers. One exciting finding, Summers says, is that the RNA molecule actually changes its shape, which enables the RNA to perform multiple functions inside the infected cell and promotes its incorporation into new viruses.

Summers says the development of this new method will allow scientists to find out how the HIV proteins interact with the RNA - research that has implications for drug discovery and the development of new therapies for patients with HIV.